Congratulations to the team at CO2L Tech for winning the Grand Prize of $30,000 in this year’s Dunin-Deshpande Queen’s Innovation Centre (DDQIC) Summer Pitch Competition. The CO2L Tech founders include Dr. Tu Nguyen, Dr. Anh Tran-Ly, and Chemical Engineering Assistant Professor Cao Thang Dinh.
For the last 10 years, the DDQIC has been bringing together emerging entrepreneurs to develop their skills, innovate, and share solutions to modern-day challenges. This year saw 15 for-profit teams from Kingston and the Queen’s community participate in a hybrid format of the pitch competition after 2 years of being fully virtual. The teams spent the summer tackling a problem and creating a solution and building a business venture culminating in a pitch to business judges on August 18th. To learn more about this year’s competitors, check out this article from the Queen’s Gazette.
CO2L Tech is trying to tackle CO2 emissions, which have been attributed to global warming and climate change. Their approach is to develop a technology called Electrochemical CO2 Reduction to transform CO2 pollutant into fuels and valuable chemical feedstocks that can be used in various industries. The process is energy and capital efficient and can be powered by renewable energy like wind or solar electricity.
CO2L Tech’s current electrochemical reaction cell has a capacity to reduce 10-20 kg CO2/ year, which is equivalent to that of 1-2 fully grown trees. When this technology is mature and widely used, many products that are currently made from petrochemicals can then be produced by CO2 and water, promoting a circular economy from recycled CO2.
As a growing cleantech company, CO2L Tech is continuously looking for new collaborations and team members. Whether you are interested in their technology or have something innovative and unique to bring to the table, feel free to visit their website or drop them a message at info@co2ltech.com.